Conflicted Loyalties to the British Crown

‘Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History’By Lucy WorsleyPegasus Books, 400 pages‘Divide and Rule: Royal Women and Their Battles’By Catherine MayerHQ, 448 pages‘Dressing the Queen: Two Hundred Years of Craft, Couture and Monarchy’By Kate StrasdinPegasus Books, 336 pages‘All the Queen’s Men: Power, Ambition, and the Making of Elizabeth I’By Sophie ShorlandPegasus Books, 384 pages ‘The Queen: One Hundred Years, One Hundred Stories’By Michelle MorganPegasus Books, 352 pagesLucy Worsley, until recently Chief Curator for Historic Royal Palaces, begins her tour with a greeting: “Welcome to the Palace!” More than a historian, her employment entailed the “presentation, appearance, development and appropriate use of the palaces including their contents and grounds.” She had her own attic room in Henry VIII’s Hampton Court.Ms. Worsley is chatty and personable about her job, beginning the first chapter, “My New Boss”: “Over twenty years I’ve had a ringside view of our changing relationship with King Henry VIII, and it’s been a rollicking ride. He’s gone from a king we love — to a king we love to hate.”The easy switch from “I” to “we” incriminates us all in the shifting ambivalences and attitudes about the very concept of monarchy, now playing out in the conflicted and contradictory lives of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. This couple seems to excite an obsession (swinging between love and hate) that has always beset monarchies and their families.From Anne Boleyn to Meghan Markle, many of the royal women have behaved and misbehaved — depending, of course, on the line you take on what it means to be loyal to the crown. You might want to just jettison what you consider to be the nonsense about royalty, and also chuck the very idea of royalty, but, Catherine Mayer insists, that doing so misses the driving forces at work in the history of western civilization, inherent in sentences like this one: “Most ranks open to royal women vibrate with the odd combination of disempowerment and privilege that is so often their lot.”For some, of course, the sheer spectacle of queendom, the thrilling June 2, 1953 debut of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, can overwhelm a nation — as it was described to me by radical socialist Paul Foot, remembering his boyhood adulation of the monarchy and shock that his uncle, Labour Party stalwart Michael Foot, spent the day at home lounging in pajamas and greeting his nephew at the door with tickets to a coronation he thought of as preposterous in a country that ought to be a republic. Kate Strasdin calls the first-time television display “the ceremony of a lifetime,” as Elizabeth II emerged in a Norman Hartnell design at her expressed wish to have a gown of “white satin and similar in form to her wedding dress.” What a canny way to present oneself as the bride of the nation. Nothing like the gaudy get up Elizabeth I had worn.Of course, the ever virginal Elizabeth I broke precedent by never marrying and playing each man and each country off one another so as to maintain her own supremacy. As Sophie Shorland shows, Elizabeth excelled at pretending interest in marriage, in seeming to observe the very conventions she flouted. Any moment, she hinted, she might just relent and form a union with a worthy suitor, yet in the end she kept her vulnerable nation intact by eluding, as George Washington did, entangling alliances.If you just want to have fun and queen around, I’d recommend Michelle Morgan’s breezy vignettes of Elizabeth II, getting married, giving birth to her children, at work, at play, on the road, being a temporary neighbor to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 during the filming of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” cosseting corgis, grandmothering and great-grandmothering, jubileeing — all decked out in pictures, pictures, pictures and one hundred stories. Ms. Morgan is an indefatigable researcher, overlooking no scrap of history that may yield what photographer Henri Cartier-Breton called “the decisive moment.” Her approach reminds me of John Aubrey (1626-1697), author of “Brief Lives,” an antiquarian and virtuoso of anecdotes, considered entertaining and eccentric, but also, in my book, in the grand tradition of Plutarch who realized that a telling detail could reveal a life as well as, or better than, a sustained narrative.Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘A Private Life of Michael Foot.‘

Conflicted Loyalties to the British Crown

Conflicted Loyalties to the British Crown

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